User Management - banning and muting

Reddit Help

When a community member has broken your community’s rules and your attempts to educate them on the issue have failed, banning and muting can be utilized to help keep the peace. To ban or mute a user, go to your moderation tools and select "banned" under "user management."

Banning

As a moderator, you can ban users from your community to prevent them from posting or commenting in your community for a set period of time.

Bans can be permanent or they can be temporary. Each ban will require you to enter the username of the individual you’re banning, a reason for their ban, a note regarding the banned user (visible only to you and your fellow moderators), a timeline for the ban’s duration, and a note for the user in question to read when they receive the ban.

Your “reason” will be sent to the user that you are banning, along with any note you choose to include in the ban message. If the banned user responds to the message with questions, this response will appear in your community’s modmail. Giving them a detailed clarification of the reason for the ban in the "note to include in ban PM" section, ideally pointing to their infraction and your community’s rules, can sometimes help limit confusion, follow-up messages, and repeat offenses.

Adding a “mod note” can also help you maintain a record of why you banned this user and give other moderators on your team insight into the ban.

Muting

Muting a user will stop them from sending modmail for 72 hours. This can be done via your moderation tools, as seen below, or directly within modmail.

As with banning, including an internal note can help give context to your action, for yourself and other moderators.

Quick Tip

You can also ban and mute users by hovering over their username and selecting the appropriate action from the hovercard tool options, as shown below.

Best Practices

Enforcement tools like banning and muting are often necessary to help any online community thrive, but they tend to be more effective when used sparingly and in conjunction with clearly stated rules and expectations.

Allowing appeals from offenders, along with efforts toward education, can sometimes turn a rule-breaking user into a positive and engaged community member. You may run into consistently negative community members and trolls now and then, but it’s helpful to distinguish between a user who has broken a rule or two but could still contribute to the community and someone deliberately trying to ruin the community for others before deciding on what action you should take. The more focused you are on reforming and educating users, the less reactive you need to be with enforcement tools. This can help you maintain a healthy community while also minimizing backlash from community members who may not understand the reasoning for your actions.